Red Spy Queen: A Biography of Elizabeth Bentley

When you title a book Red Spy Queen,
you had better deliver something lurid. Kathryn Olmsted does so in
this first, scholarly biography of Soviet spy Elizabeth Bentley, whose
career figured in several of the most important espionage cases of the
20th century.

The outlines of Bentley’s
story have long been clear. She flirted with Italian fascism after
graduating from Vassar and then, during the Depression, drifted into
the Communist Party and espionage. For years she met with spies in New
York and Washington, occasionally stuffing her knitting bag with rolls
of microfilm. The NKVD dubbed her Umnitsa—“Smart
Girl”—and eventually tried to take over her network. Frightened and
angered by her Soviet bosses, in 1945 she went to the FBI (the Bureau
dubbed her “Gregory”). Eventually she testified before Congressmen and
juries, attaining a celebrity status second only to Whittaker Chambers
in the tribe of ex-communist witnesses.

Bentley’s testimony and her 1951 memoir Out of Bondage provoked
praise and revulsion across the political spectrum. Critics called her
a neurotic liar—and worse. Defenders questioned the patriotism of her
accusers. There matters stood even before her 1963 death from cancer,
and there matters remained for decades.

The public’s
inability to measure the truth of Bentley’s testimony probably explains
why we have had no biography of her before now. Hayden Peake’s
meticulously annotated edition of Out of Bondage
has served in the breach, but revelations from American and
former-Soviet archives over the last decade have permitted a much
fuller study. Kathryn Olmsted, assistant professor of history at the
University of California-Davis, spotted this opportunity and has now
given us the closest we are likely to get for some time to a definitive
biography of Bentley.

Prof. Olmsted
carefully read the FBI files, the published revelations from Moscow in
books by Allen Weintstein, Harvey Klehr, and John Earl Haynes, and the
declassified Soviet intelligence cables decoded by American and British
cryptologists under the VENONA program. Thanks to her, we now have the
threads tied together sufficiently to explain why Bentley’s charges
were both substantially correct and almost entirely unsubstantiated by
any positive evidence until the declassification of the VENONA cables
in 1995.

The espionage
campaign in which Bentley participated has to rank as one of the most
formidable conspiracies ever launched on American soil. Soviet
military and Party intelligence organs, with copious support from the
Communist Party of the United States, penetrated many corners of
America’s government, military, and industrial establishments both
before and during World War II. The take was enormous, ranging from
gossip about New Dealers and military data to the details of the
super-secret Manhattan Project to build an atomic bomb.

The sheer size and
aggressiveness of this effort proved to be its greatest weakness.
Couriers and case officers, like Bentley, and their supervisors (like
her lover Jacob Raisin—aka Joseph Golos) had so much work that they
inevitably learned far more about their agents and the entire network
than was wise for proper security. When the NKGB in 1943-1944 tried to
split the networks into smaller, more professionally run cells, some of
the agents and their American case officers balked.

One of them, Elizabeth
Bentley, was so disillusioned and angry that she took her story to the
FBI in the fall of 1945, doing so in a way that both protected her from
Soviet reprisals and ensured that the Bureau would welcome her as a
valued defector instead of arresting her for espionage. FBI agents
used her information to mount a massive 18-month effort against the
Soviet and American contacts she named. That project bored an amazing
number of dry holes, however, finding innumerable hints that something
had gone on, but discovering virtually no evidence that the alleged
spies were actually doing anything.

Thanks to Allen Weinstein and Aleksander Vassiliev’s The Haunted Wood,
we now know that the NKGB—thanks to Kim Philby—had warned virtually all
of its operatives to lie low. When the leads that Bentley provided
petered out in 1948, Congressional investigators called her to
Washington for public testimony that was breathlessly reported by the
national media. (Reporters incongruously called her the “blonde spy
queen”—she was neither blonde nor glamorous, as several reporters
quickly noted!) It also led Congressmen to seek testimony from a
corroborating witness, Whittaker Chambers, who then implicated Alger
Hiss.

The notoriety caused
another change of life for Bentley. Like Chambers, she, too, would be
sued for slander by one of the men she called a communist operative,
and defending her case would take years and cost her much more than
money. The stress deepened her dependence on alcohol, and her
amateurish efforts to market her story led her to embellish the details
of her espionage. As Olmsted explains,

She
had led a most unconventional life, from the rejection of marriage to
her choice of careers. She had successfully planned her defection to
avoid assassination by the NKGB and imprisonment by the US government.
She had recently demonstrated that she could outwit top lawyers on the
witness stand. Now, her distorted portrayal of her life was one more
example of her practicality and her resilience. She was shrewd enough
to change her life story in a way that suited the times and her own
needs. [1]

When the inconsistencies and exaggerations in her accounts tumbled out,
Bentley retreated deeper into booze and paranoia. She also realized
that her imminent crack-up worried her new friends at the FBI, and she
learned how to squeeze money out of the Bureau by periodically causing
trouble and threatening to cause more unless they helped. Her choice
in boyfriends only complicated matters—one had to be threatened by
assistant US attorney Roy Cohn, and another told the press that she had
privately called her autobiography a work of “fiction.” Olmsted passes
a harsh judgment on Bentley:

She
had formidable survival skills, and one of those skills was her ability
to lie. She lied to others and to herself . . . . At some level,
though, she must have doubted her own comforting stories. She used the
alcohol to banish those doubts—and her inescapable guilt. [2]

Elizabeth Bentley spent her last years as a near-recluse in rented
rooms in Connecticut, teaching in a reform school for girls. She died
at age 54 of an abdominal cancer that was probably exacerbated by her
drinking, and only a handful of relatives and FBI agents attended her
funeral. Her lonely end was little noticed in the press, and mostly
welcomed there.

Professor
Olmsted’s weaving of public, legal, and declassified sources has given
us a nearly definitive life of Elizabeth Bentley, but Olmsted could
have done better at explaining the Bentley case in the context of the
larger American effort against the Soviets. Indeed, a more careful
reading of the FBI’s history would have kept Olmsted from suggesting
(on pages 67 and 93) that the Bureau had done little about Soviet
spying before Bentley finally confessed in November 1945. It’s a good
theory, but not really true. The FBI had busted the NKVD’s senior
officer in the States in 1941 and, as Olmsted notes, had opened files
on Golos and Bentley. Agents were surveilling Communist Party
operatives by early 1943, and they led them to NKVD officers under
diplomatic cover that April. The famous “Anonymous Letter” to Director
J. Edgar Hoover provided many more leads in August 1943, and encouraged
the FBI to keep a close eye on the communist and Soviet officials it
named. Weinstein relates that information from a Soviet spy in the
Justice Department, Judith Coplon (who now also has a biography of her
own), convinced Moscow in October 1945 that the Americans were always
listening.

The Bureau’s
meticulous files would come in handy when Bentley defected. That
explains a quotation (related by Olmsted) from FBI agent Don Jardine:
“We had files here, there, and everywhere,” he noted, “and she kind of
sewed it all together.” [3]

Indeed she did. Bentley’s clues were key to the early success of
VENONA. For the Bureau, VENONA became a priceless window into Soviet
espionage when it corroborated her, than rather than vice versa. It
was also through Bentley that the Bureau finally realized that the
Soviets had built an underground apparatus in the United States that
was operating almost completely apart from the Soviet diplomats that
Bureau agents had been tailing.

At least one
novelist has complained that writing fiction is harder than writing
history because fiction has to be plausible. Elizabeth Bentley’s
career was far too improbable for fiction, which shows that the truth
is often more interesting.

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